Exploration of Fecal Indicator Bacteria data sources in Tampa Bay watersheds
Prepared for the Tampa Bay Estuary Program
Kim Cressman 
Overview
This document was compiled in order to explore spatial and temporal coverage of fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) data in the Tampa Bay watershed, and determine which data sources and indicators are appropriate for future report card development. The indicator with the most up-to-date information, across all bay segments, is Enterococcus. The primary organizations collecting FIB data are the Counties, and through this exploration, additional providers with substantial datasets have also become apparent (e.g. Department of Health, Department of Environmental Protection, and some of the Cities).
A secondary goal of this exploration was to compare data downloaded via tbeptools::import_readwqp(), a programmatic interface to the Water Quality Portal’s API, to that downloaded directly from the Water Quality Portal. Data coverage is quite similar from both sources, though I recommend adding some key organizations to the tbeptools function. At least one stakeholder has experienced issues getting incomplete data through the tbeptools/API route. I have not used this function extensively - it did not give me problems while working up this report, but they could still happen in the future. The tables of sample timing and locations provided below can provide a baseline for future downloads, to make sure the number of stations and years provided in a download match closely.
The tables and figures below are identical for both download sources. All graphics and maps are interactive; hovering or clicking on an area will call up additional information.
Source code and data for this document can be found in the GitHub repository.
1. Website download
FIB Sampling points
The Water Quality Portal was queried on 1/29/2024. Query specifications were for results from microbiological sampling in the 5 TBEP counties from 1995-2022, and to only include stations with at least 10 sampling events.
The downloaded .csv file was 167MB, and so is not in the github repository for this project. A zipped version is available via TBEP’s google drive. The file was pre-processed using R/WQP_preprocessing.R to:
- filter out Groundwater samples to only retain Surface Water or unlabeled sources.
- retain only sample types Fecal Coliform, Total Coliform, Enterococcus, and E. coli (eliminating the DNA-based sample types that were contained in the file). Total Coliform is in the processed data frame but has not been included in this exploration.
- remove the majority of columns.
Temporal Heatmaps
For 2 & 3M Classes, within the TBEP boundaries, only.
By Bay Segment
By Provider
Enterococcus: Provider x BaySeg
Maps
All Stations vs. Estuarine/Marine Only
Estuarine/Marine means that Class in the WBID layer was either 2 or 3M. This map also contains layers for bay segments and wbids.